Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Stop Panic Attacks - The Best Way

There are millions of people who want to stop panic attacks and, like I did for years, they are probably searching in the wrong places.

Panic attacks are anxiety born. Anxiety is fear. Lots of different kinds of fears. A typical anxiety is of the kind where the person worries that they might lose their job. Or they may be worrying that they might lose their wife. Or their health.

The way I see it, it is almost always associated with the fear of loss. The original, primal anxiety was "How am I going to get something to eat today." It was literally "How am I going to survive today"? Fear of loss of life.

As we evolved, new anxieties came up like "How am I going to find a mate, raise a family, and support them"? Then, once you have these things in place, people face the anxiety born of the fear of losing these things. Still, panic attacks are quite another thing entirely. They are pure fear.

The sufferer becomes afraid of the attacks because the symptoms are terrifying. It gets a little bit "chicken first or egg first" on examination but the primary truth is that the attacks are caused by the fear of the attacks themselves. Even though it may seem like another fear triggers the attack that isn't what carries the attack through. While it may seem like going to that business meeting will trigger an attack, what fuels the ongoing, hyper-anxiety, fear based scene is the fear of the attacks.

First there are the symptoms. That alone would frighten anyone. Your heart pounds. Your face turns red. You start to sweat. You have trouble breathing!

And then there is the crazy dog fight of thoughts spinning around in your head. You fear you are going crazy. You worry that others will think you are strange. What's worse is, you are probably right about that! No wonder the sufferers want to stop panic attacks. It sure seems like it's going to kill them and it definitely makes a mess of normal living.

My ongoing Waterloo was business meetings. They were a mess for me. Luckily, I worked my way through it, mostly out of necessity. These meeting were VERY important to me, and before I started having these attacks I got a lot of help and money from the meetings. After struggling with the panic attacks in the meetings for years I came to a conclusion about the nature of these things.

I understood that, while the attacks were very difficult and truly ugly, they didn't hurt me, other than monetarily and a little bruised ego. Coupled with anger over the mess these things made in my life and the thought that they couldn't hurt me, I changed the way I saw these attacks and I became unafraid of them. At the next meeting, as I was headed into the room I felt the beginning fears of the attack.

Speaking to myself, and to the attack, which I had come to personify as an "evil entity" I said, "I don't care what you do, you can't hurt me." Right as I said it I felt the grip of that nascent attack loosen and slip away. I now had a cure, and, for me, the cure was learning not to fear the attacks.

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